Advancing the Teaching Profession

How Teacher Education (and Master’s Degrees) Make a Difference for Student Achievement

 I must say I am little weary of policy pundits who say that schools of education and master’s degree programs make no difference in the lives of teachers and the students they serve. Certainly there are some that do not. As Linda Darling-Hammond said in a recent interview, “probably a quarter of the teacher-education enterprise” is of very high quality. Other programs are “pretty good,” she said, “but they could be a lot better if there were incentives and supports to get them there. And there are some that need to be put out of business.”

One of the high quality programs is at the University of Florida — where a group of teacher educators, non-profit leaders, and children’s advocates have created a Ready Schools Strategy that connects teacher preparation and professional development with health and social services in Florida’s high-needs school communities.

Last week I was fortunate to work with Don Pemberton of the UF Lastinger Center for Learning, Dave Lawrence and Ana Sejeck of the Early Childhood Initiative Foundation, and Dorene Ross of the College of Education as well as several terrific teachers. During my visit I learned a great deal about their Teacher Leadership and School Improvement Initiative in Miami-Dade and its powerful impact on Redondo Elementary, located in Homestead, Florida. Redondo serves a beautiful multi-ethnic group of Pre-K through third grade students (of which almost 50 percent are English Language Learners and over 90 percent receive free or reduced price meals).

Let’s start with what matters for the kids: In 2005 less than 50% of the Redondo’s students were proficient in reading or math. Since the launch of the Ready Schools Strategy, including a specialized master’s program for a core group of teachers, the student achievement has escalated. In 2008, over 67% of the school’s third graders were proficient in reading; over 92% in math. Rene Baly, the school’s principal, credits hard-working teachers who have learned to teach differently. He also credits working conditions, which give teachers more time to learn from each other and to work closely with health care, social work, and community outreach professionals who help connect the work of teaching to the lives of students and their families.

The school’s health practitioners see 60 students a week – treating a variety of illnesses and eye and ear problems – to ensure students are ready to learn as well as feel safe and loved. Family engagement efforts bring the school to the neighborhood, but also offer tailored training in English and parenting skills to the mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles of Redondo’s children. On a weekly basis at least 25 of the school’s parents attend sessions.

Teacher preparation and support are critical components as well. Don Pemberton’s vision and entrepreneurial skills have brought a fully-paid, job-embedded advanced degree program to the school’s teachers. The UF education school has orchestrated a set of research-focused learning experiences that cultivate new teacher skills related to differentiated instruction, data driven decision-making, culturally responsive teaching, classroom management, and leadership — while giving individual teachers opportunities to specialize in literacy or second language learners. What's most striking is that the education school program is highly adaptive. It's equally helpful to a recently minted novice who had little training in how to teach in a high needs school; an alternative certification recruit who knows her content but has few pedagogical skills that enable her to teach it to diverse learners; or a veteran teacher who needs to develop new research-based skills in literacy and assessment.

During my visit I met several outstanding teachers. They were not graduates of elite colleges or individuals enticed with bonuses and performance pay to teach in high needs schools. Instead, most were from the community and represent a new vision for “growing your own” effective teachers for challenging schools. In return for being able to earn a “no-cost” master’s degree, the teachers agree to teach at Redondo for at least 5 years.

Zolia Esteve, an 11-year veteran, says that as a result of the program she is now much more effective at teaching reading. She described a second grader “Julia” who was reading less than 20 words a minute now being able to not just read but comprehend 120 words a minute. She also has the “confidence to challenge” the administration on how to better deliver services to students. Principal Rene Baly is grateful for Esteve's newly developed leadership skills and the new ideas she brings to table.

I also met Melissa LaRosa, a finalist for Reading Coach of the Year in Florida, who spends countless hours team teaching and providing support and advice to her colleagues, who view her as a “teacher’s teacher.” For Melissa, who proudly wore her Edugator t-shirt during our visit, the University of Florida master’s degree program and its focused inquiry approach made her a better coach, providing her much needed skills in using data and understanding why students were learning or not.

Finally, I was proud to meet Cathleen Caves, another teacher in the program, who actually went to Redondo when she was in elementary school. She began her career as a teaching assistant and is now one of the school’s experts in the use of a variety of formative assessments to drive instruction. Cathleen told me that the UF graduate program "is fantastic.” Pointing to Zolia and Melissa, who were in room with us, she added: “We are more like a family than ever before.” Perhaps most importantly, she asserted, “With my salary I sure could not pay for this degree myself — and now I want to teach here for my whole career.”

The Teacher Leadership and School Improvement Initiative has just graduated its first class. Next year the University of Florida expects to serve 400 graduate students (pending funding). Don Pemberton, at the helm of Lastinger Center's Ready Schools master teacher strategy, envisions preparing and supporting – and networking – 10,000 Florida educators who are all dedicated to teaching effectively in high needs schools.

Smart teacher preparation and support may just be the solution we've been searching for to end the current maldistribution of effective teachers. If so, the University of Florida is blazing a trail that other education schools and master’s degree programs can follow if they really want to make a difference.

Peer Assistance and Review: Challenging Conventional Wisdom About Teacher Evaluation

Susan Moore Johnson and her Next Generation of Teachers Project (NGT) colleagues have just launched an impressive array of evidence and resources for policymakers and practitioners to use in rethinking conventional wisdom about teacher evaluation. Dr. Johnson’s website on peer assistance and review (PAR) — a district-union collaborative where expert teachers assist their colleagues, assess them, and can make recommendations for dismissal — offers compelling facts, carefully crafted research papers, and practical tools.

No doubt teacher evaluation is a problem — one that has been well documented for generations. At the risk of some overgeneralization, most evaluation systems are comprised by perfunctory classroom visits performed by overburdened and/or ill-trained principals who generate little relevant feedback for the struggling teacher or opportunities to identify and spread the skills of the expert one.

Researchers have documented that fewer than 1% of all teachers are terminated through a formal dismissal process. As a result, policy analysts are given fodder to point their fingers at the unions, whom they claim, protect their less than competent members through ironclad collective bargaining deals that easily hand out teacher tenure and make it almost impossible to fire incompetent educators. For example, Mike Podgursky (who is a college professor with tenure at his university) often calls for teacher tenure laws to be rescinded and for building principals to be given the sole authority to hire and fire teachers with ease. State tenure laws – designed to protect teachers from administrative abuses and support academic freedom — may in fact be very outdated, but the NGT researchers have documented that principals rarely dismiss even (non-tenured) novice teachers with temporary contracts. 

Other researchers, including Jennifer Goldstein, have recently shown how “peer assistance and review results in dismissal rates significantly higher than those stemming from traditional teacher evaluation by a principal (while also supporting the retention of strong beginning teachers).” This is no surprise to me — the best teachers are going to be better at documenting their colleague’s strengths and weaknesses.

Although PAR can be expensive (approximately $4000-7000 per teacher), in a recent NGT report on the costs and benefits of PAR, the Montgomery County, MD, Superintendent called the approach “priceless.” While school district HR directors often lament the cost of firing a tenured teacher, the NGT researchers show how PAR “limits the legal expenses associated with dismissing tenured teachers.” PAR programs have not been implemented widely, but they offer a way to transcend the rancorous debates over tenure and implement a rigorous evaluation system that makes sense for retaining the teachers that students deserve.

Washington Post To Replace Veteran Journalist Jay Mathews?

Last week (April 27th) veteran journalist Jay Mathews of the Washington Post concluded — despite compelling counterfactuals from research studies — that our nation’s highest need public schools “need (youthful) energy more than experience” in their teaching ranks. In discounting a very thoughtful analysis of how untested teachers negatively impact low performing schools (also reported in the Post), Mr. Mathews’ online article ignores a host of research evidence and good old-fashioned logic.

I wonder now whether the editors of the Washington Post will replace Mr. Mathews — one of the nation’s most respected and seasoned education journalists — with a young whippersnapper right out of college. If the Post editors follow Mr. Mathews' thinking, we'll all have to say goodbye to "Jay's take" — and disagree though we may, I'd venture to say that Post readers would be worse for it.

But let’s get real: Contrary to what is portrayed in the popular media, preparation for teaching actually does matter for teacher retention and student achievement. While current teacher education and licensing standards leave a lot to be desired (and need a good overhaul), teachers with preparation and those who successfully complete an internship before they begin teaching are more effective and more likely to stay in teaching.

In fact, researchers have found a strong relationship between preparation and teacher retention. Richard Ingersoll and Tom Smith, for example, found that the more teachers learned about teaching in their pre-service training programs, the longer their student teaching lasted. And the more comprehensive their support was during the induction years, the longer these teachers stayed in teaching (Ingersoll & Kralik, 2004). Others have found that teachers’ academic ability and commitment to teaching in high needs schools are insufficient — confirming that knowing how to teach is also a critical predictor for effective teaching (Monk, 1994 & Wenglinsky, 2000 and 2002).

More recently, a New York City study found that first-year teachers who produced higher student achievement gains graduated from education programs with tightly supervised student teaching experiences aligned with their initial teaching assignment (Boyd, et. al., 2008). In reality there is a plethora of research proving that short-cut training programs “add to the revolving door of ill-prepared individuals who cycle through the classrooms of disadvantaged schools, wasting district resources and valuable learning time for their students” (Darling-Hammond & Sykes, 2003).

Effective veteran teachers, like my special education teaching wife, could tell Mr. Mathews that experience (coupled with smarts and training) counts when it comes to managing classrooms, as well as working with parents and families and the many social service agencies and community organizations needed to serve students well. As her work with the Project on the Next Generation of Teachers, Harvard University professor Susan Moore Johnson has noted that "teachers with no training had a 335 percent higher hazard [attrition] rate than those with preparation." Johnson and her colleagues have “document[ed] the stress that teachers experience when they are unprepared for the subjects they are assigned to teach” and their “struggles” to prepare lessons that can inform, engage, and empower their own students (Johnson, et. al., 2005).

Teaching experience also counts when it comes to helping all the novice teachers who desperately need help to survive teaching in high needs schools. Contrary to Mr. Mathews’ claims, what high needs schools require is a thoughtful calculation of well-trained experienced teachers with the energy and zeal of more youthful ones.  Hopefully, before the Post replaces him with an energetic 23-year-old, Mr. Mathews will take a harder look at the facts.

References

Boyd, D., Grossman, P., Lankford, H., Loeb, S. and Wyckoff, J. (2008). Teacher preparation and student achievement. Albany: Teacher Policy Research, SUNY-Albany.

Darling-Hammond, L.. and Sykes, G.. (2003, September 17). Wanted: A national teacher supply policy for education: The right way to meet the "Highly Qualified Teacher" challenge?. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 11(33). Retrieved [Date] from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v11n33/.

Ingersoll, R, M. & Kralik, J.M. (2004). The impact of mentoring on teacher retention: What the research says. Denver: Education Commission of the States, pp. 1–23; Ingersoll, R. M. & Smith, T.M. (2004). Do teacher induction and mentoring matter? NASSP Bulletin, 88, (638), pp. 28–40.

Johnson, S.M., Berg, J.H., Donaldson, M.L. (2005) Who stays in teaching and why: A review of the literature on teacher retention. Boston: Harvard Graduate School of Education: The Project on the Next Generation of Teachers. Retrieved April 1, 2009 from http://assets.aarp.org/www.aarp.org_/articles/NRTA/Harvard_report.pdf

Monk, D. (1994). Subject area preparation of secondary mathematics and science teachers and student achievement. Economics of Education Review, 12(2), 125-142;  Wenglinsky, H. (2000). How teaching matters: Bringing the classroom back into discussions of teacher quality. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service; Wenglinsky, H. (2002). How schools matter: The link between teacher classroom practices and student academic performance. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 10(12); retrieved from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n12/.